Best Of

The only two programming languages I ever learned (and knew pretty well) were ATARI Basic and GFA Basic.

Little-known Primesuspect factoid: At age 14 I actually published a commercial piece of software that I called "SheepCopy". I named myself "Mighty Mighty Software" and sold 10 copies at $15 via the Shareware Freemium model. I made $150 and it was astounding to me that I could make money writing computer programs at the time. I received ten envelopes, hand written, with $15 cash in them from various people around the country. I was THRILLED and my parents thought I was a drug dealer or something.

SheepCopy was specifically for Atari 1040STe computers that had a huge excess of RAM (1 Mb, which was pretty astounding at the time). It would create a 512k RAM Drive at boot and copy a pre-selected handful of programs from the boot floppy onto the RAMdrive, making them much faster and easier to access. It was basically like a 512k hard drive at a time when you still did everything on floppies and only few people had HDs. Sure, when you powered the system down the programs were gone but they were copied to the RAMdrive for performance and convenience, not necessity.

It was pretty cool. Still proud of it.

I wrote it in GFA basic and then re-wrote it in C++ when I learned enough of that. That was the last time I did any programming.